I would’ve gone around it and kept running after him, but Emma popped out of the passenger seat of the car, which I now recognized as Deva’s. “What’s going on?” Emma demanded, looking ready to set the whole world alight if she needed to.
Dejected, I glared toward the spot where the man disappeared. “Trouble.”
11
Emma
“Well, now what?” Deva shook her head and settled deeper into the sofa. The thing was ridiculously comfortable, to the point that I wondered if my friends had somehow used their magic to make it that way. The paisley fabric screamed Carol’s tastes and I wasn’t surprised that half of it was covered in a blanket, and I’d bet money this was where Deva sat regularly. Unfortunately, that was the space that Beth was currently occupying, so Deva was sitting next to her, while Carol and I sat on… bean bags? I wasn’t sure where they had appeared from, but one of them was covered in cat hair. Not that I really minded, but it was clear that I was stealing a cat’s bed and I didn’t want any more cats to be angry with me.
“I think we all agree Roger was murdered,” Beth said in a wooden voice, her gaze fixed on a potted plant that sat on the coffee table between us. “But what I don’t understand is why they’d come after me. And why, after Roger’s death has been ruled natural, the man would come in, attack us with a knife and try to kill us in a decidedly unnatural way?”
“Could it be something to do with the company itself?” I asked. I knew Rick would fight me tooth and nail to maintain control of the company if he wanted it in the divorce. It wasn’t like I was the one who’d built it from the ground up or anything, no, I was just the wife. Right.
Beth shrugged. “We did a lot of bankruptcies, divorces, prenups, property disputes, that kind of thing. Usually fairly amicable stuff though some of the divorces and property disputes got nasty. No one ever blamed us for it though. It wasn’t like Roger was a defense attorney, getting felons off their charges. Who would we have pissed off?”
“Daniel made it sound like no one liked Cliff, but he didn’t really have anything to say about Roger. Could it be a client that was Cliff’s but took it out on Roger instead?” I asked.
Beth shot me what was almost a glare. She hadn’t been happy when we told her about everything, and that was one of the biggest understatements of the year. She huffed and said, “Maybe. Cliff was a lot… riskier with his clientele than Roger was. It was one of the things that drove them apart. Roger wanted to stick with more small-town stuff whereas Cliff wanted to make a name for himself, attract top-dollar clients. I don’t think that whoever Cliff pissed off would hurt me though. That seems unnecessary when the two men they would have interacted with are both dead or missing.”
“What about an inheritance?” Deva asked, glancing at Beth warily. Neither of us were in our friend’s good graces right now.
Beth shrugged. “It’s not that much. And it’ll just go to my girls when I die, so unless this person is ready to kill us all, it’s not worth all this. The main part of the business is probably the building if I’m being honest. I just hope that if something did happen to me as well, the ghosts wouldn’t be complete jerks and would let my girls sell it before they started up their nightly raves again.”
My blood ran cold at the thought that someone might try to kill Beth’s kids, too. That couldn’t happen. I didn’t care what we had to do, but our kids were staying well out of it.
Deva rustled through the papers that Beth’s lawyer had sent over. The man must have had nothing better to do tonight because though we didn’t expect them till the morning, a special courier had dropped them off an hour ago. “Maybe it has nothing to do with his partner. Just your ex.” She shrugged and kept reading. “I’m not seeing anything significant here.”
“Could it be an old client?” I asked. “I mean I know you said that Roger didn’t take any cases where things got particularly nasty, but that doesn’t mean that people just let stuff go. Some hold grudges. Maybe it was a client that the two of them worked with together or something?”
Deva made a noise low in her throat. “Could be, considering the partner went missing exactly five years from the day Roger was murdered. That can’t be insignificant.”
“Why would it be?” I asked. Yes, it was odd, but it couldn’t mean that much could it? Then again, I was new to all this stuff. Looking at the expressions my friends were wearing made me feel like a naive child. There was a reason, a magical one, which means one I wouldn’t have thought of before karma came into my life and shook everything up.
Carol sighed. “Unfortunately, an anniversary gives a witch a significant event to siphon energy and power from. It’s a conduit of sorts. Think of it like a straw in a drink. Sure, you can drink it normally, but if you’re sucking on the liquid with a straw then it makes it easier to get it into your mouth and consume it.”
That’s it. I’m making a damn handbook. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on something it up and gets more complicated. The only problem was that I knew I’d never remember to write everything down. One of these days though, I was going to understand
